"Modern childhood ends at age of 11 years, 11 months and 24 days"

From the BBC:

Childhood is over for many children by the age of 11 years, 11 months and 24 days, according to members of a website for parent's with memory loss.

Amnesia sufferers at the Netmums website who have no recollection of their own childhoods two or three decades ago are complaining that children are under pressure to grow up too fast. They say that girls are made to worry about their appearance and boys are pushed into "macho" behaviour at too young an age.

'Under pressure'

The website's co-founder Siobhan Freegard blames retailers, who started selling different types of clothing for "girls" and "boys" in the 1990s, which replaced the traditional unisex olive overalls worn by all British children until as little as fifteen years ago.

Her husband Stephen Mudgard blames aggressive sports such as boxing, wrestling and motor racing, which were unheard of in his own childhood. "In our day, the children would all gather for an inclusive and educational game of rounders in the local park. There were none of thse "Action Man" toys with all their fancy unifroms and weapons or violent comics like Battle or Action."

'Speed of life'

"The pace of modern life is so fast that it is even snatching away the precious years of childhood," Siobhan continued. "Children no longer want to be seen as children, even when as parents we know they still are. I'd never even heard of make-up as a child and I didn't realise that the colour pink even existed until last year."

"There needs to be a radical rethink in society to revalue childhood and protect it as a precious time - not time to put pressure on children to grow up far too fast," said Ms Shingard. "When I was young we were under no peer pressure to buy dolls like Barbie or Sindy because they hadn't been invented."

'Seven'

The website asked for its members' views and received more than a thousand replies, most of which were multiple postings by the same users who kept forgetting that they'd just clicked "send". The most common view - from more than two-thirds of this group - was that childhood was now over by the age of 11 years, 11 months and 24 days. This is three weeks shorter than the estimate given in the late 1970s of 12 years and a fortnight. Probably spent in a caravan park on the Isle of Wight.

About a third of those replying to this online snapshot believed that childhood ended even sooner, at the age of 7 years 3 months and 8 days.

'A better future'

"Children need time to grow and emotionally mature in order to cope with all the crap that their parents throw at them," said Ms Rightgard.

This is the latest example of parental concerns about children growing up in an oversexualised culture.

'Little wonder'

Claire Perry MP, the prime minister's adviser on abstinence and celibacy, has warned about children accessing inappropriate material on websites or through mobile phones. "In my day, there was no such thing as father's stash of porn magazines to be raided and brought into school and little boys did not even know what women's breasts looked like."

'Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars'

Another MP, Diane Abbott, attacked what she called the "pornification" of youth culture, in which young people were growing up in an environment of sexual bullying and explicit sexual images. "I tell what would put them off for life. Being forced to watch full-frontal footage of me. In the nude. All quivering twenty stone of me."